Facebook to introduce Downvote Button to flag improper comments

Facebook is once more here again with new updates to fight against improper/inappropriate comments and this is one of the fight’s against Fake news shared by users.

Its not yet available to everyone as, it is only accessible by few percent of US citizen. The new Facebook downvote button is the closest Facebook has come to actually giving people a dislike button.

We are all familiar with that Facebook built the Reactions options that let you respond to posts and comments with love, wow, haha, sad or angry emoji on Facebook and its Messenger with the option to give messages a thumbs-up or thumbs-down so you could show agreement or disagreement. But this is different and note, it isn’t a dislike button, this Mark’s word on dislike button;

“We didn’t want to just build a Dislike button because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community we want to create.”

That was in 2015 and today statement confirms it all;

“We are not testing a dislike button. We are exploring a feature for people to give us feedback about comments on public page posts. This is running for a small set of people in the U.S. only.”

You might have seen Downvoting on popular tech blogs, entertainment blogs, news blog and many other but it was popularized on Reddit for crowdsourcedcomment ranking. The button is only available on posts by Pages, and not by Groups.

Functions of Facebook Downvote Button

– Helps to censor comments that are questionable with respect to a particular post.
– Helps to Facebook understand which comments on a post are “offensive”, “misleading”, or “off topic”
– Helps to fight back against the growing number of misleading information feeds that often emerge on Facebook in the form of “fake news”
– Helps to make Facebook a more people-friendly place for interactions
– Helps to give Facebook the option to obtain some insights on how its users react to different types of discussions
– Helps to enhance its users’ well-being by prioritizing News Feed content that drives meaningful interactions

A statements from Techcrunch reads; the motivation behind the downvote button is to create a lightweight way for people to provide a signal to Facebook that a comment is inappropriate, uncivil, or misleading.

How does the Facebook Downvote Button works

The main aim of designing the downvote button is to help Facebook receive feedback directly from users anyways, downvote view counts are not being visible to users, as appeared in screenshots below.

It does work perfectly and simple. By tapping the downvote button, it automatically hides a comment, and gives users additional reporting options like “Offensive”, “Misleading”, and “Off Topic”. Those could help Facebook figure out if the comment is objectionable, a form of “fake news”, or just irrelevant. Facebook already has a “Hide” button for comments, but it’s usually hidden behind the drop-down arrow on comments rather than immediately clickable.